Anthony Fauci's personal diary entries, released by Sen. Rand Paul ahead of Fauci's congressional testimony, show the former public health chief sought and received political cover from Barack Obama during the pandemic backlash.
The diary entries, made public by Paul's Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, detail a November 4, 2021 phone call in which Obama allegedly called Donald Trump a "hopeless idiot" and a "pathologic liar," called Donald Trump Jr. a "f***ing moron," and offered to personally contact senior Biden administration officials to organize a public defense of Fauci. The entries were first reported by Breitbart News, which published extensive excerpts from the diary package.
The picture that emerges is not of a dispassionate scientist weathering political storms, but of a government official actively coordinating a political counter-offensive with a former president, while simultaneously claiming to stand above the fray.
Fauci's diary entry for November 4, 2021 lays out the chain of events plainly. An associate named Leslie Dach contacted Obama and asked him to call Fauci. Fauci wrote:
"Leslie Dach had contacted Barack Obama to ask him to give me a call to see what he could do to counter the slanderous lies there have been coming from the far right press, extreme right elements in society, and even several members of the Senate and the House."
Obama obliged. Fauci recorded that the former president opened the conversation by expressing concern about how Fauci was "holding up under this onslaught." Obama told Fauci he was a "civilian" who should not have to endure such criticism, drawing a distinction between politicians accustomed to public combat and a career bureaucrat who, in Obama's framing, had "done nothing but serve the American public and the world for decades."
That framing is worth pausing on. By late 2021, Fauci was not simply a lab researcher minding his own business. He had become one of the most powerful and publicly visible figures in the federal government, shaping policy that closed businesses, kept children out of school, and restricted the daily lives of hundreds of millions of Americans. Describing him as a mere "civilian" bystander strains the word past its breaking point.
Obama did not stop at sympathy. Fauci's diary records a concrete offer of political assistance from the 44th president directed at the sitting Biden administration. Fauci wrote:
"President Obama said that he would call up Jeff Zients and tell him to mobilize some of the people in the administration to proactively go out and defend me."
Fauci also recorded that Obama offered to call Ron Klain, then White House chief of staff, "to ask them to have the administration be proactive in countering these lies." Days later, Fauci wrote that he spoke with Eric Schultz "at the request of Barack Obama," extending the coordination beyond a single phone call.
Whether Klain or Zients actually received those calls, or whether any organized administration response followed, remains unanswered. Neither Obama nor the named Biden officials have publicly confirmed or denied Fauci's account. But the diary entries, in Fauci's own hand, describe a former president offering to pull strings inside a sitting administration to shield a federal health official from public criticism. That is not how nonpartisan science is supposed to work.
The long-running effort by Rand Paul to compel Fauci's testimony on COVID-related matters has now produced material that goes well beyond questions about virus origins. These diary entries reveal a political infrastructure operating behind the scenes to manage Fauci's public image.
During the same call, Fauci recorded telling Obama about merchandise sold on Donald Trump Jr.'s website, T-shirts and sweatshirts bearing the phrase "Fauci kills puppies," tied to the controversy over NIH-funded beagle experimentation. Obama's response, as Fauci recorded it, was blunt.
"Obama said that Donald Trump junior is 'A f***ing moron.' He apologized for using crude language but then went on to say that Donald Trump was a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar."
Obama has publicly maintained a posture of measured, above-the-fray commentary about his successor. These diary entries, if accurate, suggest a different private register, one in which the former president dispensed profane personal assessments of both Trump and his son to a government official who was recording the conversation in his diary. The contrast between Obama's public persona and his private language, as captured by Fauci, is notable. Critics have previously questioned the gap between Obama's public image and his private conduct.
Obama also expressed frustration, Fauci wrote, that "none of the moderate Republicans were actually speaking out on my behalf and were distancing themselves from all of this terrible slanderous behavior against me." In other words, Obama expected members of the opposing party to publicly defend a federal official whose policies had become a flashpoint for legitimate public debate.
Throughout the diary entries, Fauci consistently characterized opposition to his policies and public statements as "slanderous lies" driven by "the far right press" and "extreme right elements in society." He described a "concerted effort to discredit me and assassinate my character."
On the beagle experimentation controversy specifically, Fauci wrote that "attacks continue falsely claiming that NIAID funded the studies." He also recorded receiving "dozens of calls" on his personal cell phone via FaceTime from unrecognized numbers, which he attributed to people who had obtained his number to harass him about the beagle research.
The White Coat Waste Project, the taxpayer watchdog group that first brought attention to the beagle studies, offered a sharply different account. Justin Goodman, the group's senior vice president, said the diary entries confirmed what his organization had long suspected. The broader pattern of alleged record management problems in Fauci's orbit has only deepened skepticism about the former NIAID chief's claims of transparency.
Goodman stated:
"From the moment we exposed Beaglegate, the Washington establishment, bureaucrats, politicians and the corporate media, circled the wagons to defend Fauci over his funding of deadly dog labs. Now, Fauci's own diary reveals that former President Barack Obama personally helped him coordinate a covert damage-control campaign to discredit White Coat Waste after we ignited what the Washington Post called 'the biggest firestorm yet for Fauci.'"
The Trump administration ultimately stopped NIH beagle experimentation, a fact that sits uncomfortably alongside Fauci's insistence that criticism of the studies was baseless.
Fauci's diary entries also surface alongside his own public statements that drew sustained criticism. In April 2022, Fauci said publicly: "You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated so that when you open up, you won't have a surge of infections." That statement framed lockdowns not as a temporary emergency measure but as a tool to drive vaccination compliance, a characterization that confirmed what many lockdown critics had argued all along.
Fauci described his own fame during the pandemic as "explosive and really unimaginable." The diary entries suggest he was acutely aware of his public profile and deeply invested in managing it, not through transparent engagement with critics, but through back-channel political coordination with one of the most powerful Democratic figures in the country.
The relationship between Obama and Trump has been defined by sharp mutual criticism for years. But the Fauci diary entries add a new dimension: they show Obama actively intervening in a policy dispute involving a sitting administration, offering to deploy political operatives on behalf of a health official whose conduct was under legitimate congressional scrutiny.
Several gaps remain. Did Obama follow through on his offer to contact Klain and Zients? Did the Biden administration organize any coordinated public defense of Fauci as a result? What was the substance of Fauci's follow-up call with Eric Schultz? And what else is contained in the full diary package that Paul's committee has released?
Fauci is scheduled to testify before the Senate committee, though the exact date has not been made public. That testimony will now carry additional weight. Senators will not only be asking about COVID origins and public health policy, they will be asking about the political machinery that operated behind the curtain while Fauci presented himself as an apolitical scientist simply following the data.
The diary entries also raise a broader question about Obama's continued influence within the Democratic political apparatus. A former president calling sitting White House officials to organize a defense of a federal bureaucrat is not standard practice. It suggests a level of behind-the-scenes involvement that voters were never told about.
When a government scientist needs a former president to run interference for him, he has stopped being a scientist and started being a political project. Fauci's own diary makes that case more clearly than any of his critics ever could.